to cry hypocrisy on Democrats' employment of RECONCILIATION to fix Health Care Reform.
*** WHAT'S YOUR OPINION? ***
RECONCILIATION is a procedure that has been used 22 times since 1980, mostly by Republicans, to allow simple majority votes in the Senate on legislation that can be budget-scored by the CBO. It is a fairly normal majority response to specific individual filibusters by the minority party in the Senate.
Since a long segment on her February 24th show, Rachel Maddow has been exposing deliberate Fox News obfuscation of "reconciliation" that would make Fox viewers think reconciliation was the "NUCLEAR OPTION", a never-used tactic that would allow Senate majorities to OUTLAW FILIBUSTERS ENTIRELY (see the link below).
After three weeks of such deliberate, big-lie obfuscation by Fox, on the day President Obama is announcing Democrats' use of RECONCILIATION to pass health care reform, Fox is harvesting the fruit from its seeding its broadcasts with big lies.
Megyn Kelly ran three video clips from May 2005, showing Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden arguing against the Republican "NUCLEAR OPTION".
Kelly's objective? To pin hypocrite labels on Democratic leaders for employing "the nuclear option of reconciliation" (a phrase that equates two very different things) to pass health care.
This is textbook Orwellian propaganda, IMO.
I'm sure Megyn Kelly's airing of these clips from May 2005 won't be their only use on Fox today and for the rest of the month. If you should see them, note the DATES pasted underneath the talking heads, and compare them to the highlighted dates the NUCLEAR OPTION was in the news in the following Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_14"Gang of 14
Democrats had been using the filibuster to prevent the confirmation of conservative appellate court candidates nominated by President George W. Bush. In the Republican-controlled 108th Congress, ten Bush judicial nominees had been filibustered by the minority Democrats. ...
As a result of these ten filibusters, Senate Republicans began to threaten to change the existing Senate rules by using what Senator Trent Lott termed the "nuclear option"... This change in rules would ELIMINATE THE USE OF THE FILIBUSTER TO PREVENT JUDICIAL CONFIRMATION VOTES.
The theory behind the "nuclear option" was that the Senate had the right to determine its own rules and that those rules could be determined on the basis of a majority vote. Democrats objected, arguing that the Senate's rules could not be changed without a 2/3 vote as stated in the Senate Rules themselves. Republicans countered that the Senate's power to govern itself was founded in the Constitution itself and that internal Senate Rules could not deny that power.
Republicans had only a two vote majority in the 108th Congress, so they were in a weak position to implement this procedural maneuver. Things changed in 2005 due to the 2004 elections. With President Bush winning re-election by a clear margin and the Republicans picking up further Senate seats (55-45) in the 109th Congress, the "nuclear option" became a more viable strategy to ensure confirmation.
Because of the political split in the Senate at the time ..., if six Senators from each party could reach an agreement, it was realized that these twelve could both forestall the "nuclear option" and force cloture on nominees. With a cloture vote scheduled on the nomination of Priscilla Owen -- the opening move in firing the nuclear option -- for *** TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2005 ***, and with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Minority Leader Harry Reid having evidently given up all pretense of finding a compromise ..., seven Senators from each party got behind a compromise which stated, in essence, that Democratic filibusters would come to an end in "all but extraordinary circumstances," and the GOP would not use the nuclear option."
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